by Stefano Caprio

At the end-of-year press conference, Putin wanted to show the face of a winner, not only because of the additional bits of territory conquered in the Donbass, but also to convey the sense of Russia's superiority against the many uncertainties of the West. The war itself has "sovereignty" as its main purpose, not so much to defend the country’s borders as to assert its independence and greatness in front of the whole world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin held the traditional end-of-year press conference on Thursday, along with the "direct line" with citizens, who had the opportunity to ask him questions.

As announced by the Kremlin, about two million requests came through, selected by an artificial intelligence network run by Sberbank, the Savings Bank of Russia, and priority was given to the "veterans of SVO", the special military operation (i.e. invasion) in Ukraine, now in its third year,  especially those who suffered disabling injuries.

Last year’s sermonising meeting with the president was not held, while this year Putin wanted to show the face of a winner, not only for the extra pieces of territory conquered in the Donbass, but to convey the feeling of Russia's superiority over the many uncertainties of the West, at the end of an election year full of contradictions that saw the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the crisis of Olaf Scholz's government in Germany.

Throwing down the gauntlet to an American journalist, the tsar proposed a "technological duel" with the Western enemy, choosing a target in Kyiv on which to concentrate all air and missile defence forces, which Russia will try to hit with the Oreshnik hypersonic missile, assuring that “we are ready to do the experiment”.

In the throes of the exaltation of war rhetoric, Putin declared that "Russia's army is in the best condition of all time", and that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria is not a defeat for Moscow, which had only the task of "avoiding the creation of a terrorist enclave", and "we have somehow achieved the goal".

After all, he noted that many Western countries wish to have normal relations with the new regime in Damascus, and all the groups active today in Syria want Russian bases in the country to remain, so "the rumours about my death are overrated," he concluded, quoting Mark Twain.

Above all, again in the verbal joust with American journalists, Putin replied to one saying that "you and those who pay your salaries in the United States would like Russia to be in a position of weakness ... Instead, I believe that we have become much stronger in the last three years, we have become a sovereign country, we depend on a few people, and we are strengthening our defence capabilities.”

The main purpose of the war therefore is “sovereignty”, not only and not so much for the defence of the borders, which has always had a relative meaning in Russia’s endless landmass, but to affirm its independence and greatness in front of the whole world.

Recently, the Parliamentary Gazette (Парламентская газета) published an article by the political philosopher Aleksandr Shipkov, dean of the Russian Orthodox University of Saint John the Theologian, one of the greatest ideologues of “Orthodox sovereignism”. In it, an attempt is made to explain the theory of war sovereignism, fundamental not only "for the material survival and resources of the country, but above all for its historical-cultural significance".

According to Shipkov, "our people are defining their national goals, and this is a historical turning point of exceptional importance." With the recovery of sovereignty, according to this reasoning, "the need for a true national ideology is reinforced", because without clarity on its contents, it is not possible to define Russia's true position in wartime.

Victory, according to the ideologue, depends on the "formulation of historical goals and the image of the nation's future," and he wonders who really has the right and duty in Russia to determine them: State authorities? Religious leaders? The community of experts? People from  the world of culture?

It is essential to decipher the ideology of the adversary, to overcome disorientation, when people "get confused about what they themselves want and why they live,” a condition in which Russia found itself in the late 1980s until the early 2000s, when under Putin it began to rediscover its identity.

Shipkov compares this transition to the Time of Troubles, the Smuta, (Smutnoye vremya, Смутное время) of the early 17th century, which ended with the victory over the Polish invaders and the beginning of the dynasty of the Romanov tsars.

Historians Jaroslav Shimov and Nikita Sokolov also reflect on this on the Radio Svoboda (Радио Свобода) programme on the “Life and Death of Great Empires", wondering whether the Russian Empire has definitively disappeared or is rather resurrecting. They remember the words of Sergei Witte, the Minister of Finance of the last tsar, perhaps the best administrator Russia has ever had, who said: "I don't know the word ‘Russia’, I only know the Russian Empire".

For centuries, the empire was the meaning and the prevailing form of existence in Russia, to which people, the entire economic system, and the well-being of citizens were sacrificed.

The Russian Empire disintegrated at least three times, in the 17th century Smuta and more recently with the revolution of 1917 and the end of the USSR in 1991, and each time it reformed itself under new guises.

Putin's "sovereignty" is the latest attempt to restore the imperial structure and, above all, the imperial mindset. Scottish historian Geoffrey Alan Hosking, one of the patriarchs of Russian studies in the United Kingdom, looked at the British Empire and the Russian Empire, noting that "from Moscow to Washington, we are still in these aspects”, going back to the first Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and Elizabeth I of England,  the Virgin Queen, in the mid-16th century, up to the present day.

For Shimov, there is a difference between maritime empires, like the British one, which has always had possessions far from the homeland, and those such as Russia, or even China, the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Empire, that expanded over land as “one piece”.

These "continental" empires are based on the close link with the metropolitan capital, the centre from which expansion starts, and to which all the provinces refer. This type of empire is always turned inwards, it does not integrate with other peoples and other cultures, but subjugates them and adapts them to its own identity, and this is precisely the meaning of "sovereignism" – the imposition of a vertical hierarchy of values and expressions, or it risks losing itself.

The cradle of all empires, ancient Rome, summed up both aspects, the vertical and the horizontal, embracing the entire Mediterranean Sea and extending over different continents, granting citizenship even to those who had never seen the capital nor the original land of Italy, like the Apostle Paul, who was granted Roman citizenship and was thus provided with the legal excuse to evangelise pagan Rome.

Russia aspires to be reborn always as the "Third Rome", Russifying peoples and cultures by land and sea, and in the contemporary world, also through the virtual spaces of information and artificial attraction.

The current structure of the Russian Federation contains many "imperial relics", as Sokolov put it, with uncertainties in the definition of the "supranational" units that are intertwined in more than one hundred Russian regions, which often refer to the dynastic principle centred around powerful elites, as in Siberia and Central Asia, or to the religious principles of Orthodoxy and Islam, with the aftertaste of the "inversely religious" Soviet ideology, of which evident traces remain at the top of the state and in the soul of people.

In this sense, the imperial principle is the opposite of the national one, and this is evident in today's Russia. Putin speaks of "sovereignism" in the imperial sense, whereas "nationalism" reflects mainly the separatist impulses of minor peoples, or the xenophobia of Russian movements of the far right.

The war for Ukraine is the war for empire, for what is its "original piece", and Moscow cannot take its teeth off Kyiv, regardless of possible peace negotiations that will probably begin in the new year.

Ukraine's sovereignty is the end of Russia’s empire, and Ukrainian identity will be the real gamble for the future, having never really defined itself in past struggles between European empires and the Soviet Cold War.

Europe’s great empires have all disappeared in the 20th century, and with America's current anti-globalist turn, so is America’s, which symbolically put an end to its world claims with the pullout from Afghanistan in 2021.

All that remains is Russia’s anachronistic empire, the sovereignism of zombies that roam the planet, looking for some country to conquer in order to find themselves.

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• russia
• vladimir putin
• moscow
• empire
• sovereignism
• ukraine
• united states
• west